Poems May 1985

A noisy sleeper

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The noisy sleeper in the other room is my Grandfather whose snores go up & down up & down like a zipper. Deeper

deeper for the dark his big breathing climbs and slips away like the moon like the day

like Cinny who I so much wanted to stay here with me in a bed too big for me. But Cinny when I let her go

was gone on her clicking toes in blackness with the thin slits open on her black nose

and not a shiver in her chest for what out there just might be waiting. She lies at ease I know on a floor in the night

body curled completely in the safety of a ring in whose fur center her head fits neatly.

In his desk for luck he keeps an Indian head penny with the date he was born which is 1898.

He promised he will look for one for luck for me which is 1953. Whatever

could be that’s wrong what is needed I know is to be watchful to be strong simply

though such breathing’s far too big for this house in which he & I together are sleeping and I do not sleep.

II. 1983

Recalling now From the subsiding brink Of earliest memory The night-sounds of that man, My grandfather, is to see How even at age five one can Accept reassurances as though They were believable while Darkly continuing to think Things over—to see how Soon the mind learns to reconcile Itself to a complex ignorance, As one begins to know

One does not know. Now whatever that unnamed Crisis actually was that placed me In that giant’s bed that night (Illness in the family? Some remote, unheard-of fight? Or, likelier, a disaster lifted From the blaze of a small boy’s inflamed Imagination . . .) it passed Much as night passes into dawn, Unobserved and at last, Leaving no trace as it drifted Wholly out of mind. Gone—

Like the existence Of all others in that house. No doubt My grandmother was there, too, Sleeping or, like me, pretending To sleep, but I don’t recall Her presence, or anyone who Played with me that day, or what fell out The next. No, in memory It’s simply two people all Alone, my grandfather and me, Bound across the distance Of a night that rises And falls and has no ending.

And yet for all Memory’s shortcomings, one still must Marvel at its power to restore The feel of that small boy’s fears, Or the way it can take an old man Dead now some twenty years And hold him up close enough To overhear the rise and fall Of his slow breathing, just As though his were once more The sort of sleep from which—broken By ruminative snorts, gruff Assentive gasps—he could be woken.

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Brad Leithauser's most recent book is The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems (Knopf).